As Mourning Doves Persist

This morning I am thinking of friends I've not seen for more than twenty years — a man whom I met protesting at Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant who held the keys to the cars of those of us in our group when we chose to be arrested and while we "did our time" and who became a fast friend from that point forward, and a woman with  whom I read poetry and drank boiler makers in North Beach  and the Mission district of San Francisco, dressed as two of the singing Supremes for Halloween, watched comets in a morning rising sky, a woman who now lives in Prague, or did, the last time we spoke and she was in New York visiting her family. I think of how people say " we talked after all this time and it was as if no time had passed ", and I wish I could bring these old companions into my rooms today, introduce them to my husband, my teenage daughter, and my dog. Thanks to the wizardry of modern day technology I could, if the connections came together, "skype...

My heart in a case. The case on the wall. Seven stations of the cross have nothing on me. Prayer comes in many configurations. Light glinting off glass. My daughter sitting next to me on the sofa. (photograph taken in Lamy's chapel, Bishop's Lodge, north of Santa Fe)

This morning I awake to just a hint of sound. A whirring and a whisper rising carries me back some fifty years, every time. The sound is the sound of birds. Purring sounds found even in the center of a sliding car pound punctuated/workman interrupted town. The fugue fleshes out with the pour and stir of mourning doves in the backyard. I don't know how near or far they are, but I know that they only visit sometimes. Or perhaps I only rise slowly enough on rare occasion to recognize the sound. Their melancholy brings perfectly to mind the recall of childhood naps. Naps in the cozy homes of grandparents who babysat, respites in eastern New Mexico, where the air was so dry that when rainfall did pitch the night, we scoured the gutters for the morning's treasures swept up and left there. Little could we have known that our world was coming undone as our parents grew up and outgrew each other. Still, their parents maintained a calm that was unflappable. Short naps in single beds und...

(if they had corresponded: from Georgia O'Keeffe to Emily Dickinson) Oh Emily, I danced again last night, and this morning there are bruises on my knees! Like black eyes just coming to the surface. Do you remember you once told me that you rolled the rug back and invited friends inside? and danced and flirted with the strict boys? Your parents were away. Today, I am my own stiff form again, but the jasmine of that new stretch lingers. G

Reason for curvature, and photographer, unknown. I see kneeling. A little research says possibly "compass timbers" — wood readied for shipbuilding. (Gryfino, Poland)

Waitress wearing a blue metal bone i.d. tag belonging to her disappeared pet. Massage therapist tapping the tops of my cheekbones. The sun setting over Cerrillos Road like a burning bright full moon in daylight. Almost too striking to see. My daughter describing the trees on their secret snowboarding run. Her legs poured into chocolate brown tights and red and black striped knee high socks.